Storage monitoring tools aid virtual environments

Storage monitoring tools can be essential to IT management by pinpointing bottlenecks and
performance thresholds. However, because traditional tools look to the operating system to gather
information, virtual environments (which use OS emulators and multiple virtual ports within each
physical host) can render older
performance monitoring tools unreliable. Furthermore, traditional tools may not be able to
differentiate virtual machines from actual hosts. To eliminate inaccuracies, tools designed
specifically for storage
monitoring in virtual environments are becoming increasingly popular. This guide will help you
to better understand these tools and see how some of your peers are using them.

Table of contents:

The rise of server
virtualization has made storage performance monitoring more difficult than it used to be
because traditional tools may not be able to distinguish between virtual machines and physical
hosts. Due to the potential inaccuracy of these tools, storage performance monitoring applications
built specifically for hypervisor environments have become more popular. Learn more about specific
virtualization-aware storage performance monitoring tools and how they work.

For hospitals that have large amounts of critical data, SAN outages and inefficient monitoring of storage can cause problems that affect patients' lives. Using effective storage performance monitoring tools can be essential to solving conflicts quickly while preventing further problems. Find out how the right performance monitoring tools were able to drastically improve one large health care provider's VMware environment.

In a virtual environment, the source of lags in performance is not always clear. With storage performance analysis, the exact resource that is creating the problem can be determined and therefore addressed more easily. VMware provides tools that can effectively monitor VMware environments, but third-party tools can be good options as well. In this podcast, VMware expert Mike Laverick explains which tools he thinks are best and how they work.

In this podcast, VMware expert David Davis argues that while VMware offers tools to monitor the virtual environment, and storage vendors have tools that monitor storage, both only provide insight into one aspect of an environment and have limited information about the virtual infrastructure itself. Third-party tools, he says, are needed to make the most out of a virtual infrastructure because they give a broader range of information. Find out the advantages of using third-party storage monitoring tools in a VMware environment.

More on storage performance monitoring for virtual environments

Check out the links below for more on performance monitoring for storage.

If your DaaS deployment has a direct connection with the provider, you could have some of the same issues a branch would. But if you need to scale or breakdown siloes quickly, cloud-based desktops could be right for you.